Commercial real estate (CRE) has long lagged behind other enterprise sectors in tech adoption. But Volca, founded by Brendan Kazanjian, is rewriting that narrative - with $5.5 million in fresh seed funding that signals a bold new chapter for sales enablement in CRE.

Backed by a high-caliber list of investors - Pathlight Ventures, MetaProp, GTMfund, Recall Capital, and strategic operators from Ramp, Gusto, Scale AI, Plaid, Branch.io, Figma, and Stripe - Volca is laser-focused on tackling the chaotic and outdated processes plaguing CRE sales.

Rather than slapping AI on a legacy system, Volca is going all-in on a net-new, AI-native platform built specifically for the complexities of commercial real estate sales. Its mission? Empower CRE teams to drive deals forward faster, with visibility, forecasting, and team alignment all in one interface.

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The Status Quo Is a Time Sink

For years, CRE sales teams have been forced to operate in a fragmented mess of Excel sheets, homegrown CRMs, and email chains. Deal tracking is ad hoc. Forecasting is a guessing game. And accountability? Slippery at best.

Volca’s platform offers a single source of truth where brokers, asset managers, and deal teams can:

• Score pipeline health in real time
  
• Track buyer/seller engagement and rep performance
  
• Model deal outcomes with AI-based predictions
  
• Set up workflows that mirror actual field operations
  

Gone are the days of manual check-ins and stale spreadsheets. Volca gives teams a living, breathing map of deal velocity, complete with flags, nudges, and proactive suggestions.

It’s more than automation - it’s augmented dealmaking.

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What Founders Can Learn From Volca’s Approach

One of the most valuable lessons from Volca’s early product strategy lies in its methodology. Instead of shipping “features” based on assumptions, Kazanjian’s team embedded deeply with top-performing CRE brokers to study what really drove results.

The insight? Elite brokers weren’t waiting for the industry to modernize - they were building their own systems, routines, and rituals inspired by B2B SaaS sales best practices.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, Volca productized those rituals. Cold outreach sequences. Weighted pipeline logic. Multithreaded contact engagement. Forecasting by stage probability.

This unlock - designing from strategy, not for feature parity - let Volca move faster than legacy CRE CRMs, while aligning perfectly with how top teams already operated.

The takeaway for founders in any industry: Don’t just observe the gaps. Observe the hacks - and productize them.

This is how you build software that feels inevitable.

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Big Market, Bigger Momentum

Commercial real estate is massive - worth $6.7 trillion in the U.S. alone - and it’s undergoing structural transformation post-COVID. With hybrid work, logistics reshuffling, and asset rebalancing in full swing, the sector is hungry for tools that help stakeholders move smarter and faster.

According to Deloitte’s 2024 Commercial Real Estate Outlook:

• 72% of CRE executives plan to increase investment in tech innovation
  
• 49% say improving operational efficiency is their top priority
  
• 65% cite deal velocity and time-to-close as core performance metrics
  

That aligns directly with Volca’s value proposition.

At the same time, the PropTech market is exploding, projected to grow from $32B in 2024 to $88B by 2032 with a CAGR of 11.5%, per Grand View Research. Within that, sales enablement and pipeline intelligence tools are forecasted as key verticals due to their direct impact on revenue and asset turnover.

CRE deal volume, after dipping in 2022-23, is showing signs of a rebound, particularly in industrial, life sciences, and data center segments. JLL reports predict a 10–15% YoY increase in transaction volume by 2025. Markets like Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix are seeing renewed activity as capital floods into secondary metros.

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A Platform Built for the New CRE Operator

Volca’s advantage lies in its ability to sit between legacy data systems and modern GTM motion. It's not a CRM replacement. It's the operational brain layer on top of existing data - making sense of who’s doing what, where deals stand, and what needs to happen next.

It’s particularly well-suited for:

• Owner-operators managing national portfolios
  
• Brokerage firms scaling their leasing pipeline
  
• Institutional investors who need portfolio-level visibility into deal risk
  
• CRE SaaS companies that want native integrations
  

Its plug-and-play approach also allows clients to onboard in weeks, not months. That’s crucial in an industry where sales cycles are long and every deal matters.

Kazanjian’s vision goes beyond software. Volca is building a movement around operational excellence in CRE - a community of brokers, operators, and asset managers sharing playbooks, benchmarking pipeline health, and codifying what “great” looks like.

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What’s Next: Team, Tech, and GTM

Volca plans to use the seed capital to double its product and engineering headcount, deepen integrations with listing platforms, and roll out new analytics dashboards tailored for brokers and REITs.

A major focus will be on go-to-market expansion. Volca’s GTM motion blends community-led growth, invite-only onboarding, and partnerships with real estate operators and VCs.

The leadership team is also stacked with SaaS GTM veterans and product leaders from companies like VTS, Salesforce, and Notion. That blend of PropTech domain knowledge and software scale execution gives Volca a unique edge.

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Why Volca Might Win This Market

Unlike legacy PropTech solutions that aim to replace everything, Volca is laser-focused on becoming the operating layer for revenue execution. It’s not trying to be all things - it’s trying to be the only thing your team opens every morning to drive pipeline.

By anchoring its value on speed-to-close, forecasting precision, and workflow clarity, Volca offers measurable ROI out of the gate.

This wedge strategy - own the moment where dollars move - is one that’s worked in vertical SaaS time and again.

If Volca can maintain product velocity, deepen integrations, and scale distribution thoughtfully, it’s not hard to imagine a future where CRE teams measure performance in Volca the same way SaaS companies live and die by Salesforce dashboards.

And that? That would be a tectonic shift in one of the world’s oldest industries.